Bringing out the undead

David LeRoy Anderson

Special effects makeup artist -- he designs, produces and applies makeup.

Current projects: “Dawn of the Dead,” released Tuesday by Universal Home Video on DVD, and the upcoming fight drama “The Cinderella Man.”

Attack of the “rabid dog” zombies: “I basically play the middleman between the script and the director’s vision, which is often different than the script. I was in ‘Dawn of the Dead’ because the script, as I read it, was impossible to do because it was so grand -- thousands of zombies in every scene. I went to the first meeting with Zack Snyder, the director, and luckily his immediate interpretation was parallel to mine. He literally started on page one without his script in hand and acted out the whole vision of the movie. The beauty was that he was in synchronicity with me from the beginning. I loved the idea that he had that the zombies are fast and kind of like rabid dogs. He had a very clear vision.”

Undead marathon: “No matter what [the project is], when you get me on board I kind of become obsessed. With ‘Men in Black’ and ‘Nutty Professor,’ they were huge Rick Baker makeup movies and he dove in. Since then I have had a couple of opportunities to head up bigger projects and I kind of just try and be like Rick as far as diving in headfirst. Doing that often requires complete immersion into the genre. I watched every zombie movie except for [the original] ‘Dawn of the Dead.’ I knew that Zack wasn’t at home watching it, and I didn’t want to sit at home watching it.”

Gruesome? Yeah: “Zack’s interpretation was ‘keep it real,’ and when you are doing a zombie movie, the only way to keep it real is base your looks on reality. And zombies are dead people, so we had to pull up images from all sorts of horrific crime scenes and postmortem books. They provided us with our palette.”

The tantalizing smell of “blood”: “It was made from two different materials. One was Karo syrup-based blood, and the other one was instant coffee-based blood. Believe it or not, we didn’t put any red color in it. It was instant coffee crystals mixed with water into a paste. It is the most disgusting color, and it dries and it flakes and it acts just like blood. It was actually kind of cool because as horrible as these [zombies] looked in the makeup, they smelled like a cup of coffee.”

With a lighter hand: “For me, particularly, the things I enjoy the most are the subtler [makeups] that really allow the actor to become somebody else. I did a TV movie, ‘Tuesdays With Morrie,’ and to date that is the most satisfying makeup job I have ever done. Jack Lemmon had never ever worn any prosthetic makeup before, so he was really interested in capturing the visual essence of Morrie. He would walk into the trailer, lean back and sit up and be Morrie -- and he just loved it. He would look into the mirror and say, ‘You did it again, kiddo.’ ”

Age: 39

Residence: Malibu

Union: Local 706, makeup and hair, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.

Salary: “The sky’s the limit.”

Academy Awards: “The Nutty Professor,” “Men in Black”

Foundation: “This is kind of a family business. My father [Lance Anderson] retired a year and a half ago and then I got ‘Cinderella Man’ and talked him into coming on board. So it was his grand finale. I grew up around it, but I never thought I would be doing it. I went to art school and always had this desire to be a painter. After I got out of school at Santa Monica College, one thing led to another. My dad got a show and offered me a job. He had just finished ‘Captain Eo’ for Disney, and he had just landed eight episodes of ‘The Twilight Zone,’ the remakes in the 1980s. When I got hired there, it was basically to sweep the floors and clean up after the artists. When I walked in and realized what was going on in there, I was immediately intoxicated with it.”